Window Capture Video Streaming

fugScreenCapture

fugScreenCapture is a new utility that allows you to capture all or part the window of an application running on your computer, and send it as a video stream to other applications that support the bigfug video streaming system.

NOTE: fugScreenCapture is currently in development, which means:

  • It’s currently only available for Windows – OSX and Linux versions are planned
  • It uses only the most basic window capture method, so:
    • The speed of capture might not be that fast on your system
    • It might not be able to capture all windows

You can download a demo version to try the capture performance out on your system and see if it meets your requirements.

Download Demo

fugFeedbackGL 1.1 update

fugFeedbackGL-Green-Screen-03

Laurent Smadja and Scott Baker informed me of a couple of problems with fugFeedbackGL, namely that alpha wasn’t working quite as expected, and that on some Apple computers, the resulting image was stretched incorrectly.

There is now an 1.1 update for fugFeedbackGL for both Windows and Apple OSX that fixes these issues.

Existing customers can download the update by visiting the My Account page.

Reorganising Websites

It’s been long overdue but I’m slowly getting around to reorganising my various websites to be more focussed on specific topics, so:

www.alexmayarts.co.uk – is now the web site for my art, talks, and workshops.

www.bigfug.com – will now be for my FreeFrame, video streaming, and other software tools

paintingwithlight.bigfug.com – is now pwl.bigfug.com and is the place for my video mapping software Painting With Light

mantis.bigfug.com – is the place to report bugs for any of my software projects

I’m moving these about at the moment so expect pages to come and go.

FFGL bigfug plugins at Echostage in Washington DC

Michael DeMattia sent me a couple of images from the recent VJ gig he did at Echostage, which is Washington DC’s largest concert, where he’s been using my fugScopeGL and fugPowerGL FFGL plugins.

EchoStage01

EchoStage02Images by Doug Van Sant Photography courtesy of Michael DeMattia (@MDfilms) and Echostage (@echostage)

Eight Years of Video Streaming

Eight years ago I first had the idea for a real-time video streaming system that would enable me to take a live stream from within my VJ software of choice at the time – Visual Jockey – and send it, either locally to another application running on the same computer, or across a network to another application running on a different computer altogether.

The original idea was to externalise not just video, but audio, MIDI, and any other streams of data.  I came up with a piece of software called PatchBox, the idea of which being that it would operate like a patch bay, allowing data to be routed from multiple sources to multiple destinations with some allowance for processing along the way.

Patch Bay

My vision was to leverage the processing abilities of all software on all platforms for the purposes of real-time creativity and art.  Why have such limitations and incompatibilities?

Of course, from testing the initial release, I soon found that streaming live video in real-time was fraught with complications; requiring a fair amount of processing and a complicated arrangement of management of images – especially across a network – to maintain a consistent, high quality stream that would be usable.

Despite initial interest, it seemed too complicated a task to maintain, although I’ve tried several times since then.

The latest release of my real-time video streaming system is the fourth incarnation (that I can remember) and is finally able to be considered as usable.  It is also the first version that has fulfilled my original goal of running on both Windows and OSX.

This new initial release currently focuses on implementing sending and receiving plugins for the FreeFrame specification used now, as it was back then, as a standard for VJ software.

I hope to incorporate the system into more software over time, including my own video mapping software Painting With Light, further pushing ahead to my goal of incorporating real-time improvised video art performance with video mapping.

3D Printed Utah Teapot

20130518_134157

A strangely profound moment today when I printed a 3D “Utah Teapot“, which is an old, and very common model often used as a simple test. Created in 1975, I’ve seen images of it and played with it for my whole life. To finally hold a physical manifestation of this wholly virtual object, feeling the faces of the polygons between my fingers for the first time, was quite fascinating. I can’t put it down now!

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